Commercial freezers employing a liquid cryogen are customarily used to freeze food products such as fruits, vegetables, poultry, seafood and the like. When an unfrozen food product is immersed in a cryogenic bath it immediately freezes in the shape that it enters the bath or, depending on the relative dimensions of the food product, may undergo a change in shape. The shape of a food product either before or after freezing begins may not be desirable. For example, shrimp which have a normally curly shape lose this shape when they undergo pre-freezing processing including peeling, deveining, butterflying, battering and breading. A curled shrimp product is more appealing than a straight or uncurled shrimp product and thus the loss of the curled shape may affect the commercial value of the food product. Similarly, some food products have a desirable linear shape, but begin to curl or otherwise lose their linear shape during pre-freezing processing.
Because processed food products become set into a fixed shape after freezing in a liquid cryogen, it would be beneficial to control or alter the shape of the food product prior to freezing.
Efforts at changing or maintaining the shape of food products during prefreezing processing have not been successful. It would therefore be a significant advance in the art of freezing food products to provide an effective means of changing or maintaining the shape of a food product prior to freezing. In particular, it would be especially beneficial to be able to straighten, curl or otherwise change the shape of food product into a preselected shape and then immediately freeze the food product so that the preselected shape is retained.